


Where He Belongs (By Her Side)

by pjiminshair



Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Episode: s07e02 Longbow Hunters, F/M, Fluff, Married Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak, Oliver Queen Loves Felicity Smoak, POV Oliver Queen, and it shows, fliclet, oliver misses his wifey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-25
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-08-07 10:44:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16406948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pjiminshair/pseuds/pjiminshair
Summary: A post-7x02 ficletHe’s always been a hero to her, right from the start, and he has spent years trying to live up to that image. He’s a hero to her. He’s a hero to a lot of people in Star City. He refuses to jeopardize the faith that she carries in his sense of justice, in his morals, even if it means getting stabbed a hundred times more.





	Where He Belongs (By Her Side)

**Author's Note:**

> So, the whole 'my wife taught me a thing or two' kinda sorta maybe canonised my headcanon just a little bit? So, I wrote a tiny little ficlet about it.
> 
> I really hope you guys like it. This thing just won't get out of my head until I wrote it, so here I am, writing Olicity fanfiction at 10 at night, even though I have a mid-sem tomorrow. smh...
> 
> HAPPY READING!!

_ “They don’t let felons search the web.” _

 

_ “My wife taught me a thing or two. Sit tight.” _

 

It’s a flippant reply, something Oliver doesn’t really give much thought to till he’s back in his cell that night, lying on the dirty cot, trying not to pull too much at the harsh jagged stitches keeping his skin together that will no doubt heal into another scar.

 

Another reminder of another one of his terrible mistakes. Sometimes, it feels like he just can’t stop making them. How long until Felicity realises that he’ll just keep ruining her life with his self-sacrificing nature? How long till she leaves?

 

_ “I will always, _ always _ wait for you.” _

 

How long till she realises that her heart would be in safer hands with someone else?

 

_ “I will always,  _ always _ love you.” _

 

How long till she realises that she deserves someone better? Someone who promises to protect her, and can actually follow through on that promise?

 

Oliver shuts his eyes close against that image. A fuel for his nightmares. He can still clearly see in his mind’s eye how broken she had looked, how tired. Oliver had made a vow to protect her even before he a had made a vow to love her. But vows meant nothing if he couldn’t even see her, much less shield her from anything that might want to hurt her. She had been beaten and yet her spirit had been at its strongest. It was that fire behind her eyes that had given him to courage to say ‘Fuck it’ to his good behaviour and clean record and beat the crap out of that guy.

 

If his wife was going to fight back, then so was he.

 

Felicity has always been the strongest person Oliver knows. And that hasn’t changed over the years. Over the course of their relationship, he’s slowly started taking cues from her,

Not giving up because she’s not giving up. 

Not giving up because she’s on the verge of giving up, and he can’t let that happen.

He lets her hope wash over him when  he’s shrouded in darkness, and musters up enough optimism to shower her when she feels like there’s no way out. Together, they keep each other afloat. They make each other happy in a world where it is so easy to drown in all the losses they’ve sustained throughout the years. 

 

Maybe that is why this decision had felt so wrong. Willingly separating from his wife and son had gone against every instinct Oliver had.  Having to depend on virtual strangers for his family’s safety had felt dubious at it’s best; but he had relinquished control, because he hadn’t seen another way out, because after being abandoned by so many people he had grown to trust in a course of months, he had started doubting himself. His abilities as a fighter, a leader, a protector.

 

He should’ve known nobody else mattered but Felicity. And Felicity never left him.

 

Oliver had expected a lot from prison. He had expected it to be a different kind of torture from what Lian Yu had been. Not being able to be with his family wasn’t the same as being tortured by mercenaries, but the pain and the emptiness it brought had been almost identical. What Oliver had not expected was how hard it was going to be to get a lead in prison, nor did he realise how far he would have to go to accomplish something. Oliver might regress back to his more stupider ways when driven into a corner, but he draws a line on doing anything that might make Felicity look at him different.

 

He’s always been a hero to her, right from the start, and he has spent years trying to live up to that image. He’s a hero to her. He’s a hero to a lot of people in Star City. He refuses to jeopardize the faith that she carries in his sense of justice, in his morals, even if it means getting stabbed a hundred times more.

 

Oliver winces as he stretches his arm, hands blindly finding the picture he keeps of his wife and son on the shelf. She’s so beautiful. Always has been, and she’s always been able to bring him a sense of peace, even when she wasn’t aware of it. He hadn’t been exactly honest with Stanley when he had said that Felicity had ‘taught’ him how to hack. In fact, he rarely was able to follow one of her tech babbles, but in the last years that they’ve spent fighting together, Oliver did make it a habit to sit by her during the downtimes between missions.

 

It had been a guilty pleasure before they got together, reading QC’s quarterly reports while sitting on the cold floor of the foundry, back against her desk and her legs barely a foot or so from his arm. He didn’t understand why he gravitated towards her then, why being close to her physically lightened the load that his soul carried, but he embraced that feeling nonetheless. Found himself warming his back with the heat of her computer systems as he sat next to her chair on the floor while she worked, or working out on the salmon ladder a lot more just because it was stationed across from where she sat, or staring down at her screens, his mind blank even as she typed at the speed of light. Felicity had a habit of talking about what she was doing even when she knew nobody would understand her, but it seems like, Oliver managed to learn the very basics of it just by basking in her presence.

 

He knows he’s nowhere near where she’s at. Knows, that if she had been here (thank God she wasn’t here) she’d been able to find a lot more than he did in a lot less time. If Felicity had been by his side, like she has been for the past six years, Oliver wouldn’t have had to aggravate someone by bringing up their family, wouldn’t have had to frame someone for police brutality, wouldn’t have had to stab himself-

 

Oliver shakes his head clear. There is no point in thinking about what-would’ve-beens. Not when the predicament he is in right now is by his own doing. He was the one who gave himself up for the safety of his family, and he sincerely believes it would all have been worth it if Diaz had been captured by the FBI. But, the fact of the matter is that Diaz is still out there, still after Oliver’s family, and all he wants right now is to get back to Felicity so that he can fight the good fight beside his wife, right where he belongs.

 

_ Well, maybe not right now… _ Oliver thinks tiredly as he adjusts his body to release some pressure he’s feeling on the wound, _ may be after the stab wound’s healed. His wife would kill him if she ever found out what happened. _

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this headcanon since like I watched season 2 that Oliver spends all his free time in the foundry when he's not working out, either making arrows, or reading reports and generally doing QC stuff while sitting on the floor next to Felicity's work station while she worked on finding their next target,
> 
> So when Oliver said the whole 'My wife taught me a thing or two' my mind immediately jumped to that one scene where Oliver understood exactly what Felicity was saying and she said, "My pride that you understood what I was saying is only slightly diminished by your lack of faith in me" (I'm paraphrasing y'all), which was then solidified with EmBett's interview today where she says that Oliver probably learned hacking 'by osmosis or something'.
> 
> The actual headcanon fic was around 500 words or something, and I generally find drabbles very unsatisfying? to write, so I added another 500 words of Olicity feels to it.
> 
> Gimme me all the Feedback. Feedback = Love.
> 
> -ms


End file.
